In Which Gyllerah Helps an Oracle and a Vampire Hunter

And now, time to get caught up on Gyllerah! Paul and I have not been exactly in sync on our playing schedules lately, so nothing major here in terms of joint plot RP. Instead, a bunch of writ running and survey exploration, and a bit of solo side questing on my part here.

Play by play

• Play dates: 11/24, 11/25, 11/27, 11/28, 11/29/2022
• Session numbers in this run: 53-57

Thursday’s play

• Did inventory management and writs, then headed out to do surveys
• Hit two surveys in Grahtwood:
  • Woodworker survey northeast of Tarlain Heights Dolmen
  • Alchemy survey near Elden Root Temple
• This was my first woodworking survey, noted that the hickory drops were all labeled “Pristine”; had to fight a few bloodfiends to get to it, apparently northern Grahtwood has a vampire problem
• Killed a nereid near the alchemy survey spot
• Took Elden Root Temple wayshrine over to Western Skyrim, Dragon Bridge wayshrine
• Went to go find Mel Adrys for the Bloody Reunion quest pointer I got off of the handbill at the Impresario’s camp
• Got the quest from him to help him hunt down vampires, and disrupt a Gray Host ritual
• Headed off to find a spot to do that
• Did some mining of ore on the way and got two different Gray Host loot boxes
• Reached the ritual site and interrupted the ritual; Mel showed up but got wounded in the fight and asked me to go hunt down more of the gray host for him
• CAN DO, but first I gotta go find this jewelry survey site, ciao
• Found a Hunter’s House which turned out to be a set station for the Stuhn’s Favor set
• Took me a while to find the jewelry site, and eventually had to check the wiki; turned out to be just WNW of the Hunter’s House, and I cleaned that out
• Killed an assortment of bears, wolves, and sabre cats through all of this
• Briefly arrived at a harrowstorm site but too late to do anything interesting
• Swam over to the Solitude Docks wayshrine and boinged home to Alinor from there
• Did round two of writs
• Finessed my current armor outfit and landed on a look I’ll keep a bit

Friday’s play

• Tried to run the quest to go see Abnur Tharn, but he was in the manor house in Vukhel Guard and I couldn’t get in there; possibly blocked by needing to complete the assassination quest, which I don’t want to do yet
• Instead went to find the enchanted boat to go look for the Oracle, which took me over to Bleakrock Isle
• Found her campsite but not the Oracle; found one of her Wyrd sisters though who sent me off to Glenumbra
• Entered a delve, the Mines of Khuras, in search of the Oracle
• Had to fight a bunch of Bloodthorn cultists and their assorted zombies
• Reached a spot where the Oracle left a mysterious note, so I used a gem to summon Vanus Galerion, who guided me through the ritual hinted at in the Oracle’s note
• She contacted us via projection and warned she’d been captured, and was being taken to Bewan; also, she warned of danger to Summerset and Artaeum (at which point I went wait what)
• Vanus said he’d have to keep the Mages Guild out of it if the Psijics were involved, but sent me off to Bewan, which was on western Auridon
• I stayed long enough to mark that delve for my map, then boinged back to Alinor
• Looked on the wiki and confirmed that yep this plot is a prologue for the entire Summerset plot, which Paul and I just finished, lolololol

Sunday’s play

• Ran writs, and could only complete four of them with materials I had
• Pulled two of the ingredients I needed out of the Guild Bank but mistakenly grabbed garlic instead of pumpkin for the third, so had to buy a pumpkin from Finnegil
• Flat out of dwarven ore and fell hide, so jumped to Vvardenfell to look for a blacksmithing survey
• Looked first in the wrong area, but discovered Shrine of Azura while I was looking
• Boinged to correct wayshrine and then found the ore site from there; got a boatload of dwarven ore
• Attempted to boing to High Isle but mistook which island on the map I needed, so I landed on Galen–which got me an achievement and a new hat in my costumes, yay?
• Boinged to the correct island, but it turned out that the clothier survey I had for High Isle was actually on the secondary island, Amenos
• Headed that way and passed an NPC, Ladlow Menant, being annoyed by a glowing green orb; guy kept respawning every little bit as I found new locations, so finally talked to him, which of course got me a quest to investigate a creepy place
• Left it for now though and tried to find the boat to Amenos
• Pissed off a dockworker by heading into a shipyard, yikes? Didn’t fight him, ran like hell instead
• Found the correct road to take to the boat to Amenos and made it over to the other island
• Found a group of NPCs near a gate which were apparently getting sentenced to life in the jungle past the gate
• Went through the gate with no trouble though and headed for the eastern part of the island
• Confronted a hostile on the way, a Green Serpent Stinger, who was an archer; took him out
• Made it to Brokerock Mine and wayshrine, which is where I needed to be for the clothier survey
• Got the samples and took the wayshrine back to Alinor
• Finished blacksmithing and provisioning writs, but discovered I didn’t actually get enough fell hide, AUGH, so I had to buy fell hide from one of the Guild traders near the bank
• Finished the last writ and parked in room for logout

Monday’s play

• Ran most of my writs except for the enchanting writ
• Boinged over to Kynesgrove in Eastmarch to try to run an enchanter survey
• Killed a few hostiles in the vicinity, but got the runes I needed!
• Boinged back to Alinor to finish the enchanting writ
• Very close to level 37 but didn’t tip over
• Parked in room and logged out for the night

Tuesday’s play

• Thought this was going to be just a run writs kind of session, but when I got done with the writs I was super close to leveling up to 37
• So returned to Western Skyrim to see if I could kill a Gray Host boss for the quest I had running with Mel
• Decided to hit Shadowgreen, which was a locale I knew as ‘Shadowgreen Cavern’ from Skyrim
• Met an elf outside who needed my help to extinguish ritual fires set by the Reachmen who want to create a new Red Mountain and destroy a lot of Skyrim
• Went in to run the delve, and killed a lot of spriggans, bears, wolves, and sabre cats
• Also several of the Reachmen, though that was often difficult at the ritual sites, since they had the ability to summon flame atronachs, which made the fighting rather more interesting :O
• Also kept getting in fights with multiple animals and spriggans at the same time
• Finally did level up to 37; dropped a skill point on Blacksmithing to get access to the next level of material
• Found a skyshard and got another skill point off of that, and dropped a skill point on Clothing to get access to the next level of materials there
• Found and killed the boss who turned out to be a hagraven
• And only after that found the last of the four ritual fires
• Got out of the delve and reported back to the elf, then rode south to report back to Mel that I’d taken out the boss
• Next action in his quest was to disrupt a harrowstorm, but it was late by then so I returned to Alinor
• Parked in room and logged off

A Bloody Reunion quest

I am not sure whether I’ve screwed this one up, since it was one I picked up while the Dark Heart of Skyrim event was still going on, and as of this writing, that event is now over. I’ll have to see if I can finish the quest, or if it’s just going to be stuck in my journal for a while or what.

I’m starting to get a little weary of a bunch of the different delves I’m visiting in distinctly different places having some variation of zombies going on. There seem to be zombies all over the damn place in this game. Some of them are caused by vampires, some of them apparently by plague, but holy crap so many zombies.

And the ones that barf all over you are really a bit much.

That said, kind of digging this quest for vampire hunting purposes. I will at least if I can see it through to conclusion, or if it’ll be stuck in my journal until such time as another Dark Heart of Skyrim quest happens. At least Mel Andys isn’t nearly as much of an asshole vampire hunter as Isran of the Dawnguard!

Also, for the latter bit of play involving this quest, it was interesting visiting Shadowgreen–a locale I know as Shadowgreen Cavern in Skyrim. This version of the locale appeared to be significantly larger. Not really surprising, since it’s a delve?

It was full of the same kinds of creatures I know from Skyrim–bears, wolves, spriggans. But also sabre cats! And Reach antagonists, a thing which reminded me that this game is Second Era and therefore pre-Forsworn.

This particular delve wound up riding the line for me between being hard enough to be challenging, and a bit too long and drawn out. I had multiple occurrences of being in a fight with four or five opponents (usually spriggans and animals, but once Reachmen and atronachs), and that started overloading me a little. I made it through without any deaths, so it was clearly not beyond Gyllerah’s capabilities! But for Gyllerah’s player, it was a bit much to keep up with.

Through a Veil Darkly quest

This was the one started off by Vanus Galerion greeting me in the Mages Guild on Auridon. And it was interesting enough, trying to track down that missing Oracle–though once it became obvious that this plot was the outright prologue to the entire Summerset zone plot, which Paul and I just finished, I just sort of had to laugh and roll with it.

Because yeah, see previous commentary about it being inevitable that you will play things out of order in this game. I think I’ve decided my sorta-kinda headcanon for this is that Gyllerah, as a victim of the Soulburst, is carrying around a side effect that periodically causes her to do weird little jumps in time. So she’s experiencing her life in kind of scattershot order.

(Mind you, I’m not sure if this is a matter of her literally jumping around in time, or her memory having trouble storing things in sequential order! It could be either! Because wild magic!)

I expect this is going to be the closest I can get to a coherent narrative explanation for this. 😉

Next time

Paul and I will eventually have another joint session in which we’ll do the epilogue to the Summerset quest line, and then go deal with the Hooded Figure!

But until then, I’ll probably see about whether I can keep doing Mel Adrys’ quest even though the Dark Heart of Skyrim event is over. And I’d also like to finish up the Through a Veil Darkly one just to get it out of my quest log.

After which I’ll probably also try to go do that one on High Isle.

Screenshots

Editing to add

1. 12/4/2022: Found a few missing screenshots and added those to the gallery.
2. 11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.